#Marginalized Voices

Storytelling as Justice for the Forgotten

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o frames storytelling as more than entertainment, positioning it as a moral act with real consequences. To “lift the forgotten” implies that people can be erased not only by death or distance, but by silence—by never being named, heard, or centered in the stories a society tells about itself. From this starting point, narrative becomes a kind of public record, one that can either reinforce neglect or interrupt it with attention and care. Because stories shape what feels normal and what seems possible, they quietly govern who is seen as fully human. In that sense, Ngũgĩ’s line asks writers and readers alike to treat imagination as responsibility, where art’s beauty is inseparable from the ethical question of whose lives are allowed to matter. [...]

Rewriting the Hunt: Voices of the Lions

Extending this insight, postcolonial thinkers argued that the archive itself can be a hunting ground. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) demonstrates how scholarly and cultural systems cast the East as an object to be mastered. Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) asks whether those at the margins can be heard within frameworks built to exclude them. Missionary journals, colonial courts, and ethnographies—however meticulous—often encoded the hunter’s priorities, making absence look like consent. Thus, the challenge is not only to add voices, but to question the scaffolding that muted them. [...]